Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life

‘I who undulated like an eel now mince on knife-point’: with what glittering myths our culture hooks and reels in its women. In poems at once nightmarishly excoriating and redemptively witty, BLU plunges us into deep waters where these myths are seen joyously refracted.

Thrift

Barbara Ungar’s poems embody, with piercing authority, the ebullience of dissolution. She is a master of sudden pathos (see ‘Garment’ or ‘For the Town Clerk’) as well as joy pulled from ‘the used, the worn, the broken in’ (see ‘To My First Address’ or ‘The Thrift Shop of My Dreams’). Ungar’s formal panache offers abundant pleasures, and manages also to be wise.